The Dark and Light of Writing

By moonlight, we see in black and white. We cannot see colors. There is something fascinating and valuable about seeing the world that way. We see only what is essential. We see form emerging from a sea of blackness. . . . We can look at the world so familiar by daylight and see it anew in the black and white of moonlight.  – Ming-Dao Deng, from The Lunar Tao: Meditations in Harmony with the Seasons

In, The Practice of the Wild, poet Gary Snyder says, "Life is not just a diurnal property of large interesting vertebrates. It is also nocturnal, anaerobic, microscopic, digestive, fermentative: cooking away in the warm dark."

Take several photographs and turn them into black and white.

Write into the darkness of shapes and shadows.

Search for new meaning in the areas of light.

Let emotions arise.

What do you find in the black and white of moonlight?

Find writing ideas and emotions cooking away in the warm dark.

Celebrate the unseen powers of the pen.  

                                             
Pay reverence to what's underneath, elusive and uncanny

Flow of Action

As regards the quietude of the sage, he is not quiet because quietness is good. He is quiet because the multitude of things cannot disrupt his quietude. When water is still, one's eyebrows are reflected in it. A skilled carpenter uses it in a level to obtain  measurement. If still water is so clear, how much more are the mental faculties. The mind of a sage is the mirror of heaven and earth in which all things are reflected.  - Chuange-tsu

How would you use water as a metaphor of flow.

"I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb."  - Buckminster Fuller

Let your identity flow. Find the action. Revise. Invent. Progress.

Inside Travel

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have begun our real journey.  

- Wendell Berry

 ". . . wanderer, there is no path, the path is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again."

- Antonio Machado

Metaphorical thinking helps the writer connect to the secrets and mysteries inside. If one decides to experience what lurks behind the door or deep inside one's own cavern, self-knowledge awaits. 

Robert Frost felt, "poetry takes you to a place you have been and thought you'd never return to."

Return to the darkness. Bring a lantern for revitalization. Illuminate sensitivities.

Take on the night.